Jeffrey Ellis - Page 44

Nashville's iconic Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre is back and better than ever! After some six months - and 50 or more years since its debut - the newly renovated and gorgeously appointed Chaffin's Barn has reopened with a rousing production of Sister Act, the habit-forming musical that played to sold-out audiences last summer.

It's fun, perhaps even joyful, and audiences are clearly delighted to reward director Matthew Hayes Hunter's youthful cast with riotous applause at the appropriate moments, but do they really endorse the message of the timeworn Jacobs and Casey script? Heck, do they even think about it?

The legend of Robin Hood is subject to personal interpretation and, given the times in which we now live, it only makes sense that playwright Adam Szymkowicz would devise his own treatment of the legend in ways both provocative and traditional. In Marian, Or The True Tale of Robin Hood, Szymkowicz posits that both Robin, the personification of the anti-hero, and his supposed love, Maid Marian are indeed the same person, devoted not only to taking from the aristocracy to provide for the peasantry, but also to foment ideas of class and gender equality at a time when such thought was considered heretical.

Playwright Tori Keenan-Zelt's emergence as a force in contemporary theater seems assured with her newest play, Truth/Dare, an incisive, on-target treatment of the pitfalls of adolescence and the frailty of relationships during a time in which everything seems in a constant state of flux. Directed by recent Lipscomb University graduate Natalie Risk, who gives Truth/Dare an immersive feel with her basement rec room set that involves audiences in every moment during the convincingly nuanced one act that's brought to life by a quartet of young actors who play off one another with self-assured candor.

We cannot help but wonder: Do peacock feathers foretell of something far more sinister and portentous than what we've seen already in both Love Never Dies and The Phantom of the Opera await our heroine in the moments to follow? We won't spoil the outcome for you, of course, but suffice it to say that those pesky peacock feathers continue to work their devilment in the intriguing production now onstage at Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center through Sunday, June 24.

There's absolutely no need to equivocate, make comparisons or to otherwise water down this particularly judgmental opinion: The Little Mermaid - the stage version of the Disney musical about a gamine sea creature who longs to become human which is now onstage at Murfreesboro's Center for the Arts through June 24 - is the best show we've ever seen among the many CFTA productions reviewed over the years. Congratulations to direct Mark David Williams, musical director Nate Paul, choreographer Brittany Griffin and costumer Lisa McLaurin for their remarkable achievements that, combined, lift this oft-produced title from the stage-bound to far loftier heights of theater excellence.

Annie, the Broadway musical by Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin and Thomas Meehan, is something of a community theater warhorse - a show that is sure to bring in throngs of theater-goers despite the oftentimes scornful dismay of the theaterati - along the same lines as Steel Magnolias, Grease and, well, you catch my drift. There's nothing epoch-shattering, paradigm-shifting or cutting edge about Annie (or any of the other shows of its ilk), but in a Nashville theater season during which we've seen laudable revivals of those other two shows, it only seems logical that a new production of Annie could be equally as entertaining and a welcome diversion.

Without a doubt, an individual's teenage years can be fraught with tension and riddled with despair and even when that is leavened by the joy of self-discovery and the constant gaining of knowledge that accompanies adolescence, there's a steep learning curve that some are unable to embrace gracefully. All of that is apparent in bare, a pop opera, the almost completely sung-through "rock musical" currently onstage at Nashville's Music Valley Event Center in a production from director Seth Limbaugh's Radical Arts.

Verge Theater Company continues its trajectory as one of Nashville's leading and most adventurous theater companies with its wondrous production of David Lindsay-Abaire's Kimberly Akimbo, featuring an astonishing and electrifying five-person cast under the superb direction of Laramie Hearn.  Kimberly and her eccentric family help the company inaugurate its own performance space, aka The Barbershop Theatre, located at 4003 Indiana Avenue, just a short jaunt from Charlotte Avenue and not too far from the iconic Darkhorse Theater.

Now onstage at the Z. Alexander Looby Theatre as the concluding production of Circle Players' 2017-18 season, Disney's Beauty and the Beast is brought to life by an eager-to-please cast and crew, giving further proof to the universality of the story and the continued delight of audiences lucky enough to score tickets (Circle Players' production has been playing to near-capacity, often sold-out, audiences in its three-week run at the Looby).

Why am I writing about my obvious journalistic shortcomings now for what could be construed for the third time? Street Theatre Company's production of the Hunter Bell-Jeff Bowen musical [title of show] opens tonight to run through June 23 - and last night I was part of the preview audience, having been invited to come review the show for those of you still reading (all the while scoffing at my apparent self-indulgence and wishing I would just get to the point).

There comes a moment late in act two of Waitress, the Jessie Nelson-Sara Bareilles musical now onstage at Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Andrew Jackson Hall, when Desi Oakley - the actress portraying Jenna Hunterson, the show's very pregnant heroine - finds herself bathed in the bright glow of a spotlight and she delivers the show's stirring and emotionally driven climax: a performance of Bareilles' plaintive pop ballad "She Used to Be Mine," arguably the score's best-known and most beloved song.

At first blush, it would be easy to say that there's not much action packed into Annie Baker's The Flick - now onstage in a noteworthy production from Nashville's Verge Theater Company at Belmont's Black Box Theater - but that is, in fact, a pretty simplistic take on a story that is as complex and as diverting as real life itself. And just like life, Baker's Pulitzer Prize-winning script packs a whole lot of drama into its storyline, which is brought to life by a superb cast of actors under the direction of Jaclyn Jutting.

Grease has been a part of the American musical theater vernacular for so long - it opened in Chicago some 47 years ago in the halcyon days of 1971 - that it's easy to overlook the show's impact on theater, in general, and audiences, in particular. Its multiple revivals on Broadway, in regional theater and in various community theater and high school drama settings probably makes you believe you've seen in far more often than you actually have (unless, of course, you watch the film treatment with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John over and over).

Nashville Repertory Theatre's Ingram New Works Festival - Nashville's annual celebration of new plays and playwrights - returns to Music City May 9-19. The festival gives local audiences an opportunity to hear fresh work created by exciting new voices, while making new friends while connecting via new works for the theater.

Nashville Repertory Theatre's Ingram New Works Festival -- Nashville's annual celebration of new plays and playwrights - returns to Music City May 9-19. The festival gives local audiences an opportunity to hear fresh work created by exciting new voices, while making new friends while connecting via new works for the theater.

Filled to overflowing with youthful energy and plenty of showbiz razzle-dazzle, CoPlayers Theatre's production of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown - directed and choreographed by the peripatetic Tosha Pendergrast, easily the busiest musical theater choreographer in Middle Tennessee - does what so many other renditions of the show have failed to do over the years: Thoroughly entertain me! And, in so doing, Pendergrast and her ensemble of impressive young actors have erased from my preferred Charlie Brown vocabulary such words as boring, vapid and stultifying, instead replacing them with electrifying, engaging and fun (which normally should be written in all caps and followed by a surfeit of exclamation marks)!

Nashville Repertory Theatre will open its 2018-19 season - its 33rd - with a production of the Broadway hit musical Avenue Q, opening on September 8 at the Andrew Johnson Theatre at Nashville's Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

Now onstage at Brentwood's Towne Centre Theatre, Ludwig's Shakespeare in Hollywood (not to be confused with the musical Shakespeare in Love, which is based on an Oscar-winning film) once again takes audiences to 1934 to tell the story of the mirthful hijinks surrounding Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt's efforts to film an adaptation of his Hollywood Bowl production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Reinhardt's film treatment of the work is, perhaps, more critically acclaimed now than when it was first released back during the heady days of Hollywood's golden era and the director has been lauded with praise for his one and only film that starred several silver screen legends in roles that went creatively against type, presenting the actors with tremendous challenges.

Distraction Theatre Company inaugurates its third season with a third play from The Reduced Shakespeare Company - The Complete World of Sports (abridged) - taking on the complete world of sports and announcing a new collaboration with another non-traditional venue partner for the production. The latest show from Distraction runs April 20-28.